michael brannigan

Published 12:00 am, Sunday, July 31, 2011

Problem-solving? Decision-making? Pondering, "What is the right thing to do"? "How am I to act"?

Herein lies the persistent hazard for ethics, particularly as an institutionalized field: its near-obsession with "the problem."

To explain, I first offer two senses of ethics. First, it is the formal philosophy and theology discipline that I've been trained in, together with other humanities and science courses. Second, it is an applied field, like my work in health care ethics, and more thoroughly institutionalized.

It has burgeoned through numerous academic and professional ethics centers, journals, graduate programs and consultancies including hospitals, businesses, law, environmental groups, research centers and government commissions.

Precisely in this latter sense, ethics is now big business as it tackles hot topics and problems. For instance, bioethics focuses more on headline issues spawned by richer nations' biomedical technologies (embryonic stem cell research, reproductive cloning, nanotechnologies and neuroethics, for example) and, regrettably, less on poorer populations' plight of poverty, hunger, health disparities and violence.

One reason is that so-called ethicists (a term I resist if "ethicist" refers to a "moral expert") are often employed by institutions from which they must, of necessity compelled by their discipline, maintain a critical, impartial distance. Yet, they risk becoming "team players" when their institution sets their agenda, and pre-selected predicaments become moral cargo.

At its best, Baywatch ethics is minimalist, superficial and shallow. If we limit the scope of ethics to "doing the right thing," we merely crawl on the surface. Ethics, in my first sense above, requires that we dive deeper into the deep sea of moral character, circumstance and conduct.

In his timeless "Nicomachean Ethics," Aristotle's chief concern was not in resolving specific perplexities, but in how we should live our lives, giving us a broader vision of what constitutes for us the pursuit of what is good through cultivating good character. Aristotle's point: Doing and being co-exist.

To illustrate, given digital communication's immediacy, ease, face-to-face absence and anonymity, children and adolescents particularly encounter the perils of cyber-bullying and online rudeness. By focusing solely on fixing the problem via proscriptions, "thou shalt nots" and school guidelines, we commit a moral failure in merely treating the symptom.

Youth must first recognize that these are problems. Pincoffs reminds us, "There are no moral problems for the child whose character is yet to be formed."

Recognizing something as problematic presupposes some degree of moral character. The real challenge in ethics education lies in instilling ideals of good character and learning virtues early on.

This is the aim behind Doane Stuart teachers Patty and Seamus Hodgkinson's pioneering "Just Kidding" Middle School program that confronts cyber-bullying and incivility by addressing their roots through instilling and encouraging good character.

Surely, attending to problems is necessary to engage us in the complexities of ethics. Yet when we downplay character, when we reduce ethics to mere doing and decision-making, ethics becomes fluff, solely a matter of compliance, following rules, a cocoon of "as long as it's legal."

Ethics, ultimately about refusing to turn away from others and their afflictions, hinges upon who we are and who we become through what we do. This means redirecting our gaze from the skin of conduct to looking deeper within ourselves.